Shakespeare's A Lover's Complaint and early modern criminal confession

Shakespeare Quarterly

Volumn 53, Issue 4, 2002, Pages 437-459

  Craik, Katharine A ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 60950122969     PISSN: 00373222     EISSN: 15383555     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/shq.2003.0023     Document Type: Article

References (47)

1. Ward E. Y. Elliott and Robert J. Valenza,"Glass Slippers and Seven-League Boots; C-Prompted Doubts About Ascribing A Funeral Elegy and A Lover's Complaint to Shakespeare," Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 177-207, esp. 198
2. Ilona Bell, "'That which thou hast done': Shakespeare's Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint" in Shakespeare's Sonnets: Critical Essays, James Schiffer, ed. (New York and London: Garland, 1999), 455-74, esp. 456
3. See John Kerrigan, ed., The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986), 13-15
4. My citations of Shakespeare's poem follow this edition. Wendy Wall has further shown that the combination of sonnet sequence and complaint in these "literary pseudomorphs" draws attention to the dislocation of gender in male-authored, female-voiced lament, thus enabling new forms of poetic authority; see her The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1993), 250-69
5. In his introduction to Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and 'Female Complaint': A Critical Anthology (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991)
6. John Kerrigan surveys the "generically complicated literature" of early modern complaint (14-23). My own essay builds on Kerrigans study by considering the peculiarly interesting questions raised by criminal confession. The term female complaint, used to describe a male-authored, female-voiced lament, is also Kerrigan's
7. On the "association between the language of individual penitence and a female voice," see Suzanne Trill, "Engendering Penitence: Nicholas Breton and the Countesse of Penbrooke" in Voicing Women: Gender and Sexuality in Early Modern Writing, Kate Chedgzoy, Melanie Hansen, and Suzanne Trill, eds. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1992), 28
8. For a discussion of the complex interplay between speech and agency in Renaissance lyric, see, for example, Heather Dubrow, Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1995), 89-91 and passim
9. Many members of the clergy, as well as their parishioners, were nostalgic for the regular practice of confession; see Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in popular beliefs in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), 154-59
10. On the changeable and porous female body, see Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca and London; Cornell UP, 1993), 47
11. Stanley Wells has noted that the "lover" in the title could be either the female complainant or the male seducer; see his edition The Sonnets and A Lover's Complaint (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 11
12. On the seducer's performance, see also Joan Rees, "Sidney and A Lover's Complaint" Review of English Studies, n.s. 42 (1991): 157-67, esp, 159-60
13. For a discussion of public role-playing between strangers in both the theater and the metropolis, see Richard Sennett, The Fall of Public Man (London: Faber and Faber, 1986), 37
14. Peter Brooks, "Storytelling without Fear? Confession in Law and Literature" in Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law, Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz, eds. (New Haven and London: Yale UP, 1996), 114-34, esp. 115
15. Brooks extends his study in Troubling Confessions: Speaking Guilt in Law & Literature (Chicago and London: U of Chicago P, 2000)
16. On the relation between the disappearance of the confessional and the phenomenon of "gallows confessions," see Thomas, 187
17. See Frances E. Dolan, Dangerous Familiars: Representations of Domestic Crime in England, 1550-1700 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1994), 6
18. see The Works of Thomas Deloney . . . , ed. Francis Oscar Mann (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), 482-85
19. The anonymous ballad The sorrowfull complaint of Mistris Page ... is reproduced in The Shirburn Ballads 1585-1616, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), 111-13
20. For an analysis of how these ballads "position Askew between writer and written, speaker and spoken," see Joan Pong Linton, "The Plural Voices of Anne Askew" in Write or Be Written: Early modern women poets and cultural constraints, Barbara Smith and Ursula Appelt, eds. (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2001), 138-51
21. Joseph Marshburn assesses the social standing of the Saunders family in "A cruell murder donne in Kent' and its literary manifestations," Studies in Philology 46 (1949): 131-40
22. See Frances E. Dolan, "'Gentlemen, I have one more thing to say': Women on Scaffolds in England, 1563-1680," Modern Philology 92.2 (1994): 157-78
23. Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen 1985), 129-48
24. and J. A. Sharpe,"'Last Dying Speeches': Religion, Ideology and Public Execution in Seventeenth-century England," Past and Present 107 (1985): 144-67
25. See Raphael Holinshed, The Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, 2 vols. (London, 1577), 2:1865-66
26. John Stow, The Annales, Or Generali Chronicle of England (London, 1615), 674-75
27. r. The case is discussed briefly in Belsey, 136
28. V
29. r
30. r. The ballad is reprinted in Old English Ballads, 1553-1625
31. Chiefly from Manuscripts, ed. Hyder E. Rollins (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1920), 341-48
32. On the deracinated voice associated with "female complaint," see Anne Howland Schotter, "Woman's Song in Medieval Latin" in Vox Feminae: Studies in Medieval Woman's Song, John F. Plummer, ed. (Kalamazoo, MI: Studies in Medieval Culture, 1981), 29-30
33. All quotations of Anne Wallens Lamentation follow the facsimile edition of The Pepys Ballads, ed. W. G. Day, 2 vols. (Cambridge: St. Edmundsbury Press, 1987), 1:124-25, esp. 124
34. Anne Wallens Lamentation, 124
35. Anne Wallens Lamentation, 125
36. Heather Dubrow has written on rival voices in Shakespeare's plays and poems, especially The Rape of Lucrece, in Shakespeare and Domestic Loss: Forms of Deprivation, Mourning, and Recuperation (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 60-61
37. V
38. V
39. r
40. Henry Goodcole, Heaven's Speedie Hue and Cry (London, 1635), title page
41. V
42. The equation of silence with guilt was (and arguably is) the "best weapon" of custodial interrogators; see Brooks, Troubling Confessions, 31
43. Brooks, "Storytelling without Fear?" 122
44. r
45. r
46. Compare Elizabeth D. Harvey's discussion of "transvestite ventriloquism" in Ventriloquised Voices: Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992), 4-5: "male authors create a feminine voice that seems to be - but is not - linked to a whole set of feminine characteristics (a sexualised body, an emotional make-up, an imagination)."
47. Lorna Hutson, ed., in Ben Jonson, Volpone and Other Plays (London: Penguin, 1998), xxiv